rms@AI.MIT.EDU (11/15/89)
The principal purpose of info-gnu-emacs (a.k.a. gnu.emacs) is to convey announcements and polls on behalf of the GNU project to the users of GNU Emacs. Some of these are techncal and some are political. In other words, not for discussions and not for asking for help. It is useful for people to have a place to ask for help, and to have certain technical discussions. Currently we don't have any other place, so this list gets used. But, as a result, the list fails to serve its primary purpose well, since many people who just want to see occasional announcements can't stand the volume and stop reading it. Just this week someone I met in person complained to me about this. I have been asking Tower for months to have separate newsgroups created for technical discussions, for posting sources, and for asking for help. I don't know how these things are done and I don't understand why it takes so long, or even who would really do it--I don't use or understand netnews. So what is the diff between asking for help and a bug report? It is not based on whether you are ignorant of how to proceed. That is typically true *in either case*. The difference is based on whether if you observe some sort of misbehavior. If you don't know how to begin trying to do something, you just want help. If you try the obvious thing and get a malfunction, you have a bug to report. But it occurs to me that requests for help might as well go to bug-gnu-emacs along with bug reports. If asking 100 people gets you an answer, that is better than distracting 1000 people with a question and then with several messages containing the answer. If you don't get an answer from the smaller list, then try the larger one.